Locked into low achievement

Our urge to label is strong, but we can’t make excuses for children with special needs based on this alone, says Nancy Gedge...

Back in the days when I was a full-time teacher, I had the great good fortune to find myself working in a school where we, the staff, agreed with each other. It wasn’t just about things like when to hold sports day, or which biscuits to have in the staff room – we agreed on a deeper, more philosophical level. We agreed on what was best for kids.

These days that great team is scattered far and wide, no longer working closely together; me, I left because I had a baby. I moved away and started a new life, but the influence of those people and that school rippled onwards, especially when I found out that my baby had an extra copy of chromosome 21, Down Syndrome. I knew, thanks in part to them, and the professionals I was introduced to following his birth – the physiotherapists, the play specialists, the Portage workers – that my son was more than the label he carried; in front of that label there was a little boy whose individual characteristics said far more about him than any genetic abnormality.

I was lucky. I had no experience whatsoever with Down Syndrome before my son was born. I had no preconceptions, other than I knew I would have to actively teach him how to do stuff as opposed to letting him discover it for himself – in the way of his more ‘ordinary’ infant counterparts. As he grew, I would bear more responsibility. But as far as I was concerned, his future was an open book, just like everyone else’s.

I remember the first time that a child with ADHD came into my class. I was scared. As when Sam was born, I had no idea what to expect, but I had heard some stories that caused me concern. Was I going to have chairs thrown at my head? What would happen when the drugs wore off? Could I treat him the same way I did the rest of my class, or would I need to don kid gloves for fear of what the consequences might be? So I could kind of understand how Sam’s teachers must have felt when he rocked up, so different from the rest.

It’s not that he would do better without the label, far from it. Without it there would be no hearing tests, sight tests or heart scans – all as a matter of protocol. Without it he would not have been so easily entitled to support through a mainstream primary, support he needed. Without it, we may well have had to join the struggle that so many parents and teachers face when their children need help, but no-one can quite put their finger on what is wrong and what exactly it is they need.

What I didn’t appreciate, though, is that while I had no experience of Down Syndrome, or of any other significant learning difficulty for that matter, other people did, and they brought their experience with them. They couldn’t help but make excuses for Sam, to compensate, because they fell into the well-intentioned trap of assuming that, because they knew one child with Down Syndrome, they knew them all. As a mother I watched with increasing levels of first bewilderment and then frustration as he made minimal progress, and his behaviour spiralled downwards; he was allowed to get away with far more at school than he was at home.

Pupil Premium, Gifted and Talented, ASD, middle class, working class, white, black, Asian, Muslim, boy, girl; our urge to label, to make sense of our world, to categorise, to sort into sets and group together is strong. It’s part of what we do, but we can’t afford to give excuses to our labelled kids, whatever those labels might be. We can’t afford to lock them into lives of low expectation and low achievement, something the new SEN CoP hopes to address. As educators and as parents it is our job to open the doors, to help them find and unlock their potential.

Because he is my son, and I am a teacher, I know with my heart, as well as my head, that the labels we give to children have power, and it is our responsibility to use them wisely.

About the author

Nancy Gedge is a primary teacher in Gloucestershire. She blogs at notsoordinarydiary.wordpress.com